'What is your master's name, Poignard?' said Bois-Guilbert.
'Philip of Doncaster, my lord,' said Hooker, improvising quickly.
'I do not know him. These three men,' he pointed at the corpses, 'you killed them?'
'He fought to protect his master's goods, my lord,' Rebecca said. 'He saved them and the mule which bears them and was wounded in his efforts.'
'Your master is fortunate in having such a faithful bondsman,' said the Templar. 'Take his goods and go. Tell your master that Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert has released him from his obligation.'
'Wait, Brian!' called De Bracy. He came riding up to them with two young men beside him. He turned to his and the Templar's squires. 'Are you certain this is the man?'
'There is no doubt, milord,' said De Bracy's squire. 'I recall that scar upon his face.'
Bois-Guilbert's squire nodded. 'It is the same man,' he said. 'The white knight's squire.'
Bois-Guilbert leaned down, reaching out to the sole remaining mule and ripping away some of the rough cloth that was lashed over the load. The nysteel armor was revealed. He tore away the cloth and there was the shield with the uprooted oak upon it.
'A Norman fallen on hard times, you said?'
Rebecca looked away.
Hooker's heart sank. All he could think of was that vision of himself lying dead upon the ground, his head nearly severed from his shoulders.
9
Hunter poured Lucas a cup of tea and himself a glass of bourbon. 'I'd offer you some of the good stuff,' he said, 'but you'd best take it easy for a while.'
'This is amazing,' Lucas said, slowly sipping the hot tea. 'You've got Chinese tea and Kentucky bourbon, recordings of Bartok, Vivaldi, The Rolling Stones and P.J. Proby, Castello and Mastro De Paja pipes, Senior Service cigarettes, vintage Margeaux wine…'
'I've always had a taste for the old-fashioned things,' said Hunter with a note of pride, unable to conceal his pleasure at having a guest who could appreciate his acquisitions. 'Would you care for a pipe?'
'Thank you, I would.'
Hunter selected one for him, passing it to him along with a pouch of English blend tobacco, a mixture of the finest Oriental and Havana leaves. Lucas examined the pipe. It was a briar, a billiard shape, perfectly straight grained. He checked the stamping.
'This is a 1917 Dunhill,' said Lucas. 'It's almost brand new!'
'Picked it up in London not too long ago,' said Hunter.
'How did it happen?' Lucas said. 'What are you doing here?'
'Okay, I'll give you the abridged version,' Hunter said. 'I was floater-clocked into this time period with the 82nd Airborne.'
Lucas nodded. He should have guessed as much when Hunter said he had a chronoplate. The 82nd Airborne had a long and extremely colorful history, dating back thousands of years. Once a crack division of paratroopers, the 82nd was now a floater division. They were para-time cartographers, pathfinders, without whom the time wars could not be fought. In the early days of time travel, there had been disastrous accidents with people materializing inside walls, clocking back into the same location occupied by another person. Such accidents were still possible and they occurred from time to time, but to minimize their possibility, there were the floaters. These soldiers always preceded any fighting unit sent back into the past. They charted the geographical locations and the time periods in which the soldiers from the future would do battle, making extensive surveys of terrain and construction, population density, climatic conditions, in short, everything that would affect a soldier sent back into that time and place.
They were clocked out above ground, equipped with floater paks, so that they would appear in Minus Time at very high altitudes, which eliminated the possibility of their appearing in a space occupied by someone or something else. Using their floater paks, they would descend to isolated areas, where they would break up into teams, each team equipped with survey equipment and a chronoplate. These were crack troops, the cream of the Temporal Corps, the most disciplined of soldiers. 'I know what you're thinking,' Hunter said. 'It's not like a floater to desert.'
'As a matter of fact,' said Lucas, 'that's exactly what I was thinking.'
'Well, don't be too quick to pass judgment, pilgrim,' Hunter said. 'Put yourself in my place, first. We were sent to map out this area, preparatory to a mission in this sector and this time period. Come to think of it, I wouldn't be at all surprised if whatever hitch you're in on had something to do with it, although I can't be sure. I've been here for a while and I've clocked around some, so I kinda lost track of time, if you know what I mean. Anyway, to make a long story short, my team ran into trouble. Some of us came back dressed up like knights, nysteel armor and the works, others came done up like peasants, outlaws, serfs, whatever. My team were woodsmen. We had weapons that should have seen to our survival, but you oughtta know that it doesn't always work out that way.
'We came down in a deserted section of the forest, not too far from here. Plenty of game and the deer didn't run from you all the time, which meant that some of them had seen men and some of them hadn't. Anyway, I'm getting off the track. Point is, things were so damn quiet that we dropped our guard. We watched ourselves whenever we surveyed sectors that were populated or that had seen some traffic, but every time we came back here, we just felt real safe, you know? Of course, the moment we got to feeling that way, the shit hit the fan. We got to feeling too safe. We posted a guard every night, naturally, but this one night, one of the boys fell asleep. Maybe he fell off by accident one night and nothing happened, and after that he just took to nipping out on duty, I don't know. Whatever the case was, Jase was asleep the night we got hit.
'They were outlaws. Locksley's bunch. They shouldn't have even been in this neck of the woods; we had them charted miles away and we'd observed that they didn't like to wander too far from their stomping grounds, but this time they did. Maybe one of us got careless and was spotted. Either way, I woke up that night to find all hell had broken loose. There were about fifteen or twenty of them and only seven of us. We had no chance. They took us completely by surprise. None of us so much as got off a shot. Fortunately, we had our gear under a safety field and they couldn't get at it. They must've thought it was black magic or something.
'We had always figured they were pretty harmless. Bunch of crazy woodsmen who were drunk on their asses half the time. Just goes to show you, never underestimate the opposition. I was the only one who survived. Four of the boys had their throats cut in their sleep. The rest of us got taken out by arrows. I took two, one in the shoulder-' he pulled back his robe to display an ugly scar, 'and one in the leg. Missed my femoral artery by about a fraction of an inch. On top of that, one of 'em practically caved in my skull with a quarterstaff.
'They must have figured I was done for, because when I came to, double vision and the whole trip, they were gone and our camp was in a shambles. They wrecked everything they could get their hands on, looking for something worth stealing. They must have departed in a hurry once they came across the gear within the safety field. That probably made them think they'd just wasted a den of sorcerers. I helped them along in that direction later. Alexei was still alive. I found him with four arrows sticking out of him. No chance to save him, he died in my arms, laughing, laughing for God's sake, at how stupid it all was. And that left just yours truly.'
Hunter took a healthy sip of bourbon. 'I waited around for several days for S amp;R to show up. But there must have been some sort of slip-up. I don't know what the hell went down. They never showed. The implants of the dead men should have reported six KIAs, but no one ever showed. It finally occurred to me to test out my own implant. I stuck my finger in the hollow just behind my right ear, you know the drill, we all do it whenever we get to feeling paranoid, and nothing. No test tone. I just kept poking myself and poking myself, but no beeps went off inside my head. Only one conclusion. That rap on the head took out my implant. Still beats hell out of me why none of the others registered, but near as I can figure it, someone must've screwed up in S amp;R and our team never got logged. I assume the others all made it back all right, I never heard anything about them. But my team was the lost patrol. No one even knew we were back here. Typical army efficiency.'
'But you still had your chronoplate,' said Lucas. 'You could have clocked back on your own.'
Hunter nodded. 'I had intended to. I doctored myself up as best I could and then I waited for the S amp;R
